Posts Tagged ‘bloodroot’
Annual Occurrences
The smell of blueberry pancakes and delicious breakfast sausage frying on the outdoor grills lingered in my senses all day long yesterday. Under a beautiful blue sky, we mingled with locals, leisurely devouring the sweet maple goodness while enjoying one of the great storytellers I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. Tom Sherry owned “Best Built Fence” when we moved here, and he and his wife, Sue, helped us design the layout of our paddocks and pasture fence lines.
Tom is one of those people who radiate the fullness of life with dramatic tales about his many adventures. He will always define, in my mind, our experience of moving to rural Pierce County, and what it is like to live here. I always feel better about being here after spending time with him.
Another annual event kicked off yesterday as our neighbor to the north plowed the field adjacent to our property.
Asher was barking up a storm over the presence of the highly revved big tractor slowly making its way back and forth on the other side of our natural fence of piled tree limbs. I spotted the son following along on an ATV, picking rocks, and saw it as an opportunity.
When Raymond stopped to survey his progress, I hollered to him, and he trudged across the field to appear friendly. I see him as being the opposite of Tom in terms of storytelling. Getting information from Raymond requires a sweet-talking effort, and even then, the responses sound a bit like forced confessions.
He tells me he intends to plant alfalfa in the field this year, but he seemed to feel it was unlikely to happen. I gather it had something to do with how wet the field is. There was no concern about the value of the fieldstone his son had collected. My place was as good as any other to dump the small wagonload he had amassed.
I hope the threat of possible thunderstorms tomorrow doesn’t result in us experiencing one of those downpours that wash his freshly tilled soil over Cyndie’s perennial garden again.
The first forest wildflowers of spring are showing up. The annual blooming of Bloodroot blossoms is always a fun accent to the orchestra of greens emerging after the ground truly thaws.
Just a few hours later, with the sun dropping lower into advancing clouds as the day was coming to an end, the flowers were folding up their glory.
The speed of growing grasses and leaves is picking up, and soon that patch of bloodroot will be a carpet of large leaves dominating the vicinity. Watching it all unfold in a few days’ time is one of the many rewards of walking a dog multiple times daily through our woods. Daily throughout the twelve months of changing seasons is a pretty great perspective to gain about a lot of things.
Nature’s annual occurrences are always fascinating performances to witness in person.
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Bloodroot Blooming
The first bloodroot flower appeared yesterday morning. I wasn’t in the woods late in the afternoon but I bet there were plenty more spreading their petals to join it by the end of the glorious day. All that whining I’ve been doing about how wet it was is a thing of the past, for a few days, anyway.
If you look closely, you can see rolled up leaves cradling the buds of many more flowers about to make their way. The distinctly shaped leaves will fully expand after the blossoms drop and get rather large in size.
Following the appearance of trout lilies and bloodroot will be the trillium we transplanted from the lake place up near Hayward. I’ll be looking for some evidence we succeeded with the most recent transplants by our change to keeping them in a more dense group when replanting.
Attempts from previous years weren’t looking very robust and definitely weren’t thickening up nor launching new sprouts. I got the impression we planted them too far apart from each other and ended up isolating individual plants.
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In an entirely unrelated topic, I had a chance to have multiple staff at the bike shop working together to hunt for the source of the bothersome creaking sound my new bike was making. After patiently listening to my long-winded explanation of what I have been experiencing, one of the guys mentioned that my shoes looked new.
Yes, they are. He grabbed an allen wrench and snugged the screws holding the cleats on each shoe as I presented the bottoms of my shoes to him. Could that have been it?
I hopped on and rode around the parking lot.
Nope. Mystery sound still present.
I convinced the mechanic to step outside and listen as I pedaled. The sound was obvious but the source of the sound was not. As a group of employees stood around offering guesses, the mechanic was trying different things with my bike. Suddenly, I heard the sound.
“You found it!” I exclaimed.
He was putting pressure on the left pedal and torquing the frame to reproduce the sound. Another guy felt all around the carbon frame trying to locate the source and to everyone’s surprise ended up thinking it was coming from up around where the seat post fits in the frame.
Trek has something they call IsoSpeed that “decouples” the seat tube from the top tube to diminish the fatiguing impacts of the road. There is a good chance something related to that mechanism was causing the sound. I needed to leave the bike with them to investigate how it is all supposed to work.
At the hour the store was closing last night, I received a message that my bike was ready to be picked up. I’ll stop by later today to get it and hopefully learn more about what they needed to do to solve the problem.
I’m really looking forward to pedaling a much quieter (new) bike.
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Spring Progress
Or lack thereof… We are sorely lacking in the warmth and sunshine department but spring growth is beginning to emerge, not all of it desirable. We are already seeing a growing collection of sediment beginning to fill in where we dug out dirt last year to improve drainage in front of Cyndie’s perennial garden.
Two steps forward, one step back. -_-
The water pressure in the saturated ground pushes up little geysers in random places and that flowing water is carrying topsoil from the farm field just uphill from us. Just lovely.
The forest floor is about to burst forth with trout lilies along our paths.
These are the earliest of the wild ground cover that carpets certain areas of our woods. Soon to be followed by bloodroot.
Delilah and I walked through the back pasture to get a closer look at the new grass sprouting. Cyndie wants me to wait for the blades to get more than six inches tall before beginning to slowly give the horses access to grazing green grass.
The only thing we are missing is heat and sun. I know it’s out there. We just need to be patient. There is a reason dull things get compared to watching grass grow but seeing the steady progress every day in the spring is joy to behold. A dull joy sometimes, but still… joyous. 🙂
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Relative Something 